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REST API Design Rulebook - WADL

 
Greenhorn
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Hi Mark,

What is your opinion on WADL. Should a RESTful service provide one or is the standard dead in the water?

Thanks,
Kim
 
author and iconoclast
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Kim Baddeley wrote:Hi Mark,

What is your opinion on WADL. Should a RESTful service provide one or is the standard dead in the water?

Thanks,
Kim



Hi Kim,

I am a fan of the concept of making all sorts of metadata available to clients and servers that wish to "introspect" a web API's resource models and/or its data structures/schemas. While this certainly isn't a need that all clients will have but many do benefit from the kind of information that machine interfaces/contracts like WADL can provide. I have no strong bias for or against WADL, but in my crystal ball, I don't see it suddenly catching on and becoming a big part of our forward looking, client-server (REST API-oriented) web app architectures.

So, while I can relate to the ideas that inspired WADL, I am not a big fan of how it is "implemented" and I am also not sold that it adds enough value for my apps to bother with it.

If others have found it compelling and have been able to leverage it to write less boilerplate code (or whatever), I would love to hear some of those success stories.

-Mark
 
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